In line with the shift toward dementia-friendly communities, HCI research is increasingly exploring holistic ways to support people living with dementia as active community members. However, less is known about how existing community networks influence technology design and effectiveness. This paper analyses Community-Based Participatory Design (CBPD) workshops conducted with individuals living with dementia, their spouses, and program coordinators through Wenger’s Communities of Practice Framework. We demonstrate how participants’ interactions created a community of practice through their: engagement in creating mutual meaning, alignment around a common purpose, and imagination in envisioning new possibilities for inclusion. Our findings highlight the agency of participants as they worked to create inclusive experiences for themselves and others. Our findings additionally demonstrated how community boundaries create systemic barriers that lead to non-participation. We argue Wenger’s framework offers a roadmap for designing technologies that foster person-to-person interdependence, helping to build more genuinely inclusive communities.

Cross-sensory correspondences provide opportunities for designing rich sensory HCI, with prior work showing that features such as roundness and sharpness are systematically linked to language, color, sound, and emotion. Yet two challenges remain: few technologies can dynamically transition between these features, and little is known about the thresholds at which a form is judged as sufficiently rounded or spiky to realize these cross-sensory effects. We present triMorph, a pneumatic shape-changing interface capable of smoothly morphing between spiky, flat, and rounded configurations. In a psychophysical study with 30 participants, we quantified perceptual accuracy and precision in mapping triMorph shapes to visual-linguistic categories and examined shape–color and shape–emotion correspondences. Results reveal threshold values for reliable categorization, with rounded shapes linked to pleasant emotions and lighter colors, and spiky shapes to arousal and darker tones. Our findings provide empirical foundations and design guidelines for grounding shape-changing artifacts more firmly in cross-sensory cognition.

Surface textures play a critical role in shaping interaction with tangible and multisensory technologies, yet little is known about how their microstructural features influence cognitive and affective responses - factors central to interface design. We investigated this through cross-sensory correspondences of textures systematically varying in roundness and size. Thirty participants explored 3D-printed textures under visuo-tactile and tactile-only conditions, rating them on visuo-linguistic association, roughness, colour, and emotion. Rounded textures were often linked with Bouba and pleasantness, whereas pointed textures were associated with Kiki, higher arousal, and warmer colours. Visual access also influenced exploratory behaviour, reflected in applied normal force. These findings demonstrate how microstructural tactile cues shape cross-sensory and affective associations. We propose cross-sensory correspondences as a methodological framework for designing microstructural features of surfaces textures, which could open up new design opportunities for pseudo-haptic feedback, texture-rich tangible interfaces, and coherent multisensory experiences in VR/AR.

Emerging wearable robotics demand design approaches that address not only function but also social meaning. In response, we present Sumbrella, a soft robotic garment developed as a speculative fashion probe. We first detail the design and fabrication of the Sumbrella, including sequenced origami-inspired bistable units, fabric pneumatic actuation chambers, cable-driven shape morphing mechanisms, computer vision components and an integrated wearable system comprising a hat and bolero jacket housing power and control electronics. Through a focus group with 12 creative technologists, we then used Sumbrella as a technological probe to explore how people interpreted, interacted and imagined future relationships with soft robotic wearables. While Sumbrella allowed our participants to engage in rich discussion around speculative futures and expressive potential, it also surfaced concerns about exploitation, surveillance and the personal risks and societal ethics of embedding biosensing technologies in public life. We contribute to the Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) field key considerations and recommendations for designing soft robotic garments, including the potential for kinesic communication, the impact of such technologies on social dynamics and the importance of ethical guidelines. Finally, we provide a reflection on our application of speculative design, proposing that it allows HRI researchers to not only consider functionality but also how wearable robots influence definitions of what is considered acceptable or desirable in public settings.

Metaphors improve communication between children and adults, which can be challenging due to differences in experiences. Cross-sensory metaphors convey qualities associated with one sense using terms from another, e.g. a “sharp smell'' and could thus improve generational communication by bridging differences in sensory cognition. We observed children (8-11yrs, n=65), young adults (18-24yrs, n=51) and older adults (60-85yrs, n=38) playing Sense-O-Nary, a variation of Pictionary where players construct and interpret cross-sensory metaphors, and analysed differences in metaphor type, degree of elaboration, and association strategies. We found that children relied on ``familiar experiences'' for metaphor construction, while adults used more diverse association strategies. Degree of elaboration was consistent across ages for tactile and visual stimuli but differed for olfactory stimuli. All groups used ``active'' metaphors most commonly, but children showed more use of ``implicit'', ``similes'', and ``personification''. We present designs that demonstrate how these characterisations could be leveraged to improve intergenerational communication.